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Comment by awrence | Hacker News Reader

Given the monetary policy Satoshi chose and the headline he picked to include in the genesis block, I really don't think you can infer what he himself thought bitcoin was meant to become, even if he referred to it as cash originally.

Beyond that I don't see how it matters what something was designed to do or what early adopters personally used it for or thought it was meant to be used for. The only relevance for a technology is what it's actually adopted for over time and the total addressable market cap for a store of value being 100x + of that of a medium of exchange, it makes perfect sense to me that that's the feature the market converged to by far as reflected amongst other things by the relative prices between current btc and bch...

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Satoshi wrote extensively about what he imagined Bitcoin could become, including in emails to me that I later published. Certainly, what was done to the original Bitcoin completely voided Satoshi's goals and offers an abject lesson in the difficulty of keeping institutions on-track over time.

Note that the same tactics that were used to wreck Bitcoin are now being deployed against Nix, as the open source community has struggled to learn the right lessons from Bitcoin.

> it makes perfect sense to me that that's the feature the market converged to

The market certainly didn't converge to that outcome. It was the result of relentless political scheming and psychological manipulation of a small number of people, combined with criminal tactics like DDoS attacks. The winners of that fight have then tried to retcon what happened as some sort of natural or obvious outcome, but then why did it require so much viciousness and illegal behaviour?

The market value of all cryptocurrencies seems to move in tandem, or at least did many years ago when I last cared about this topic. It reflects nothing more than the general hype and brand awareness around Bitcoin and crypto. Certainly a "store of value" that can't directly be used to purchase things is worthless, as any government that wishes to void that store of value and force users back into their own currencies can do so overnight by simple legal fiat.

Honored to get a reply from you sir!

I haven't personally done a deep dive on Satoshi's intentions probably for the specific reason I've always failed to see why former intentions or aspirations for technologies, even by their own creators would have any relevance towards their future use cases. If Edison had said light bulbs were for heating should we then oppose them being mostly adopted and optimized for lighting?

As a very passive but very interested stakeholder at the time of the block size wars it really felt to me there was heavy politicking and various degrees of !@#$ going on from all sides. The amount of viciousness certainly didn't surprise me given the immense magnitude of the stakes involved with potentially replacing a market in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.

I'm not sure I follow your last point. Stores of value certainly don't have to be mediums of exchange to build market cap (whereas the converse is true). That's true of the great majority of monetary wealth in the world. Most of fiat currency is held in treasury bond form (not a medium of exchange), real estate is heavily monetized and stocks to a degree. The actual dominant medium of exchange today is cash mostly in bank deposit form and it's a tiny fraction of that market which mostly sits on longer term horizons in assets that perform the function of storing value better. Are you saying a government might void converting stores of value to mediums of exchange? Or cryptocurrency specifically? In essence that they would make those assets illegal altogether? If they did it's true they would become worthless, at least for that jurisdiction, but some of the market obviously disagrees with that assumption, and landmark events like the bitcoin etfs continue to point the other way.

> including in emails to me that I later published

Without headers.

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